"Unsubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would be impressed by the deep regard in which these fair disciples evidently held him and his work. Miss Heatherton was to pour the tea, and Miss Long was to distribute the thin lettuce sandwiches which formed its somewhat unsubstantial accompaniment. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... comfortable relations, the disillusionment spreads and widens. I do not say that the nearer view of life is not more just, more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working of some strictly determined law. The dreams fade, become unreal and unsubstantial; though not rarely, in some glimpse of retrospect, the pilgrim turns, ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which he descended in the blithe air of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came out from him and shook her almost ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... expressly for their own phenomenology: it contained a moral meaning that harmonised precisely with all their philosophical ideas. What could be a better illustration of that MAYA, that metaphysical Delusion, in which all souls are wrapped, which leads them to impute Reality to the Phantasms, the unsubstantial objects of the senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste? And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this thirst of the gazelle, as an emblem of the treacherous and bewildering fascination ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... like a pale jewel. How strange, I thought, to think of this liquid gaseous juice, which we call water, trickling in the cracks of the earth! And just as the fish that live in it think of it as their world, and have little cognisance of what happens in the acid, unsubstantial air above, except the occasional terror of the dim, looming forms which come past, making the soft banks quiver and stir, so it may be with us; there may be a great mysterious world outside of us, of which we sometimes see ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... chilly air, out of the homeless fields. With such array of cheerful usages I beguile my wondering heart, and chase away the wild insistent thoughts, the deep yearnings that thrill me. Thus am I bidden to desire and to be unsatisfied, to rest and marvel not, to stay, on this unsubstantial show of peace and security, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thing real in them is the earth which in its essence remains ever the same whether you call it the pot, plate, or Jug. So it is that the ultimate cause, the unchangeable Brahman, remains ever constant, though it may appear to suffer change as the manifold world outside. This world is thus only an unsubstantial appearance, a mirage imposed upon ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... we are girt about on all sides by water, shielded only by a frail ceiling of unsubstantial material—the air that we breathe—which bears up the clouds and carries that weight of water, not in obedience to the laws of nature, but by the command of God, or by the power of ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... hopeful fancy they appeared, he told Cecil, to have gravely implicated Ralegh, as well as Cobham. Investigated with a view to a positive arraignment, the pile broke up and evaporated. Watson's and Brooke's stories proved as unsubstantial as the astonishing romance adopted by grave de Thou. According to the French annalist, Ralegh, in disgust at the loss of his Captaincy of the Guard, had joined in a plot to kill the King, started by a band ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... interesting before; and I shall be equally frank in saying that—I have never been able yet to believe half the tales I have heard about the mysterious discovery of buried treasure. There is something so unsubstantial about most of them. Of course, there may be ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... vacciniums, the red-leaved sundew, the asphodels, the cranberries and blueberries and bilberries, and the wonderful green mosses in all the wetter places; and, above and around all, the great mountain chains veiled in pale, ethereal atmosphere, and rising in it as airy and unsubstantial as if they could tremble in unison with every thrill of the ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... bore the appearance of explaining away Christianity altogether, or at least of making it rest upon the most shadowy and unsubstantial grounds, there is no wonder that it called forth a vehement opposition: no less than thirty-five answerers appeared within two years of its publication, among whom are found the great names of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... are in reality, one the detailed and particular, the other the comprehensive and universal aspect of the same world of duty and virtue. Morality without religion is a cold, dry, dreary, mass of disconnected rules and requirements. Religion without morality, is an empty, formal, unsubstantial shadow. Only when the two are united, only when we bring to the particular duties of ethics the infinite aspiration and inspiration of religion, and give to the universal forms of religion the concrete contents of human and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... seemed an illusion, and so, most strangely, did Aunt Keziah, whom he had known all his life, with her homely and quaint characteristics; the grim doctor, with his brandy and his German pipe, impressed him in the same way; and these, altogether, made his homely cottage by the wayside seem an unsubstantial edifice, such as castles in the air are built of, and the ground he trod on unreal; and that grave, which he knew to contain the decay of a beautiful young man, but a fictitious swell, formed by the fantasy of his eyes. All unreal; ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... compromised by the load of debt which swells portentously with every hour of warfaring. But if we have been wont to undervalue the strength of Federaldom, latent and displayed, we have perhaps scarcely realized how very unsubstantial and slippery are ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Ambition to create began to die; the dream scenery of his ill-controlled mental life more and more seldom took shape of words on paper; and there came a time when thought grew wholly wordless for him; a mere personal pleasure, selfish, useless, unsubstantial as the glimmer of mirage over ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... than that of short-sighted and credulous old men. But somehow or other I have strayed away from the friendship of the perfect, that is of the "wise" (meaning, of course, such "wisdom" as human nature is capable of), to the subject of vulgar, unsubstantial friendships. Let us then return to our original theme, and at length bring that, too, to ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... palpability a musical composition is to acquire, must be derived from its form, or design, and not from its totally unsubstantial material. It must fall back upon the network traced by the disposition of its points and lines upon the musical canvas; for this it is that constitutes its real ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... ordinary fire can still be a thing of wonder to the man whose mind is open to receive impressions even from the commonplace. How illusive it is!—dancing, darting, flickering, flashing—appearing, disappearing—unsubstantial yet active and almost miraculously potent. The effect upon the mind of primitive man must have been keen and vivid to the highest degree, and must have produced results of corresponding significance upon ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... 1864, reports came to Virginia of mines on the Yellowstone. The reports were founded on some strange tales of old trappers, and were clothed with a vagueness and mystery as uncertain as dreams. Yet on such unsubstantial bases every miner built a pet theory, and a large "stampede" took place in consequence. I started with a party for the new mines, early in October. A day's ride brought us to the Madison Fork, a broad, shallow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... their share in all the current literature of the world), and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy and unsubstantial, in his mode of development, to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to a satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... may be better. I learned, love, that something had been said or done during your journey,—or perhaps only something thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... thickened at places into opaque and rushing veils. Under the pressure of the strong, hot wind the big mahallas, with their white sails in tense curves, careered down the river with only a streak of white foam under the prow to show they were not suspended in the air. The further bank, pale and unsubstantial, was outlined fitfully in the hurrying gloom. A kind of lividity spread over the picture, bleaching it of all colour. Everything in the wards became silted over with fine powder, and the big yellow and black hornets and the ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... without. Next shower'd into my fantasy a shape As of one crucified, whose visage spake Fell rancour, malice deep, wherein he died; And round him Ahasuerus the great king, Esther his bride, and Mordecai the just, Blameless in word and deed. As of itself That unsubstantial coinage of the brain Burst, like a bubble, Which the water fails That fed it; in my vision straight uprose A damsel weeping loud, and cried, "O queen! O mother! wherefore has intemperate ire Driv'n thee to loath thy being? Not to lose Lavinia, desp'rate ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... awakened for its fate. Indeed, the most listless admirer of art, as well as the antiquarian devotee, has just cause to lament this accident; especially as the taste and labours of our times fall far short of the olden glories of architecture. When we think of the "unsubstantial pageant" of the recent "Festival," and associate its fleeting show with the desert remains of this venerable pile, our feelings deepen into melancholy, and the smoking fragments of art seem ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... now to be more unsubstantial than the fabric of a dream. I cannot think of Clara or of my mother without despair. For oh, Herbert, between me and them there seems to yawn a dishonored grave! Herbert, they talk, you know, of an attack upon the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... feeling, as he said, too full of excitement to eat; but he found the meal ready, with one of the maids in attendance, and everything so calm and quiet, that, as they sat chatting, it seemed as if all this excitement were as unsubstantial as the distant rumours of war; while, when the meal was at an end, his mother's words tended to lend some of her calm to his ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the shadow of the shade of what was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enthusiasm, by habit, by preconceived opinions, but above all, by the influence of authority, which knew well how to deceive him, to turn his ignorance to esteem, his sloth to advantage. Thus imaginary, unsubstantial systems, have supplied the place of experience—of mature reflection—of reason. Man, petrified with his fears, intoxicated with the marvellous, stupified with sloth, surrendered his experience: guided by his credulity, he was unable to fall back upon it; he became ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous yet more or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as unsubstantial as their inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of doing whatever mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion as in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are they ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... me," she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein many a deity, shadowy, but immortal, looking ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... quality, have not yet been moulded to any exquisite refinement by the perfecting of the virtues—I mean, the love of glory—and fame for high services rendered to the commonweal. And yet consider with me how poor and unsubstantial a thing this glory is! The whole of this earth's globe, as thou hast learnt from the demonstration of astronomy, compared with the expanse of heaven, is found no bigger than a point; that is to say, if measured by the vastness of heaven's sphere, it is held to occupy ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... nor unsubstantial, but evidently hastily prepared, being chiefly broiled slices of beef, on which salting had begun; but there was a lack of bread, even of barley, though there ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the fields, trotting smoothly behind his stallion. The earth was blue and cold and ghostly, a land carved out of dreams, seemingly unsubstantial and unreal. A harsh, bitter wind blew from the north, stirring the telegraph-wires by the roadside to a loud, humming refrain. A silence as of death reigned over the land, yet life thrilled through ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... those of the grave and meant a grave for you or for me. Oh, I know what I say! There was no mistaking their look. As it burned into and through me, everything which had given reality to my life faded and seemed as far away and as unsubstantial as a dream. Nor has its power over me gone yet. I go about amongst you, I eat, I sleep, or try to; I greet men, talk with women, but it is all unreal, all phantasmagoric, even yourself and your love and, O God, my baby! What is real and distinctive, an absolute ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... aerial, aeriform, ethereal, atmospheric, pneumatic, unsubstantial; breezy, windy, ventilated; visionary, unreal; vivacious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... or incidental. I suppose that comes from the fact that while he stores away in his mind everything that is essential, and trusts to his memory for that, he has not the time, which less busy men have, to verify every unsubstantial detail before he speaks or writes. Sir Thomas Browne put on record his opinion of such critics ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... same subdued attire in which I saw him four years ago, came gliding up the street the dark, sullen milkman; and there, too, close behind him as ever, followed his shadowy companion! It is in vain to deny it. I could feel my heart beating audibly when I beheld them, as if they were unsubstantial visitants, whose appearance I expected the grave would have interdicted from my eyes for ever. It was a dim, bitter, wintry day, and showers of sleet were drifting heavily on the fierce and angry wind, soaking the man's garments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... this country in the season of flowers. Whole hillsides of chamisal ("chamiz" or greasewood) bore their delicate, spirea-like, cream-colored blossoms—when seen at a distance, like a hovering breath, as unsubstantial as dew, or as the well-named bloom on a plum or black Hamburg grape. The superb yucca flaunted its glorious white standards, borne proudly aloft like those of the Roman legions, each twelve or fifteen feet in height, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... Unsubstantial, however, as these rules may seem, and difficult as it may be to convey them in writing, they are still seen and felt in the mind of the artist, and he works from them with as much certainty as if they were embodied, as I may say, upon ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with a young Italian who responded exquisitely to the swift, bright, unsubstantial beauty of her acting, and whom she seemed fairly to bathe in the amber loveliness ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... with my colleagues and this man's friends, and succeeded for a time, but they obliged me at last, either to sanction what I felt to be wrong, or openly to protest against their proceedings. I protested. And now the unsubstantial peace which had existed between us for a time was followed by a very unhappy rupture, which left deep and angry wounds in the hearts of all ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... inscribing his emotions certainly achieved a wide popularity, and wore his fig leaves with becoming modesty, he has never since been quite free from an overhanging doubt that the compliments and genial remarks with which he was assailed owed their modulation to an unsubstantial atmosphere of two-edged significance which for a period enveloped all whom he approached; as in the faces of maidens concealed behind fans when he passed, the down-drawn lips and up-raised eyes of those of fuller maturity, the practice in most ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... to have been the general Assyrian practice to unite together in the same worship, under the same roof, the female and the male principle. The female deities had in fact, for the most part, an unsubstantial character: they were ordinarily the mere reflex image of the male, and consequently could not stand alone, but required the support of the stronger sex to give then something of substance and reality. This was ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... constructed huts of clay and branches of trees thatched with straw. Thus, to the dismay of the Moors, within four days the light tents and gay pavilions which had whitened their hills and plains passed away like summer clouds, and the unsubstantial camp assumed the solid appearance of a city laid out into streets and squares. In the centre rose a large edifice which overlooked the whole, and the royal standard of Aragon and Castile, proudly floating above it, showed it to be the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... comfortless on the edge of a rush-bottomed chair, with its shadowy knees drawn up till they nearly touched its shadowy chin. There was something about the outline of this figure so indefinite and unsubstantial, that you might have taken it for an optical illusion, a spectral apparition on the point of vanishing. This thing was, however, possessed of voice, and was speaking in a low but distinct hissing whisper. As the whisper ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... containing a personal attack on the bishop-elect, and warning the Scottish bishops of the unknown evils that would follow on his consecration. The manly uprightness and good sense of Bishop Skinner dispersed these unsubstantial mists of detraction if not of malice, and he thus disposed of the unworthy attempt to injure Seabury and intimidate his consecrators: "I cannot help considering the whole of this intelligence as a mean and silly artifice of some ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... smooth expanse, their legs upward, as if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling. Salisbury Cathedral stands as substantial in my thought as our own King's Chapel, since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... would be utter ruin. The matter is now undergoing consultation. Weak-kneed damned fools are on the move for a new candidate to supplant the President. Everything is darkness and doubt and discouragement. Our men see giants in the airy and unsubstantial shadows of the opposition, and are about to surrender without a blow. Come to Washington on the first train. Every man who loves the Chief must lay off his coat now and fight to the last ditch. He's too big ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion of the substance," to quote from the preface to "The House of the Seven Gables," this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of Short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the unsubstantial realms of fantasy. In no one's writings is this better exemplified than in Hawthorne's; not even in Poe's. There is a propriety in Hawthorne's fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne's effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. To Poe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... rule in men's lives, it must be through their thoughts. It must become intelligible, clear, real. It must be brought out of the flickering moonlight of fancy and surmises, into the sunlight of certitude and knowledge. Dreams, and hopes, and peradventures are too unsubstantial stuff to be a bulwark against the very real, undeniable present. And such certitude is given through faith which grasps the promises of God, and twines the soul round the risen Saviour so closely that it sits with Him in heavenly places. Such ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... smoked, or dried in the sun. On the sudden emergency of a hasty march, they provide themselves with a sufficient quantity of little balls of cheese, or rather of hard curd, which they occasionally dissolve in water; and this unsubstantial diet will support, for many days, the life, and even the spirits, of the patient warrior. But this extraordinary abstinence, which the Stoic would approve, and the hermit might envy, is commonly succeeded by the most voracious indulgence of appetite. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... functions of life, while the Cinderellas were relegated to the chimney corner. And the godmother must come out of fairy land, if she came at all, and transformed one with a wand. That was why the glories were so unsubstantial, and why the ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... slowly to his feet. His eyes were fixed upon the opposite corner of the hall. Lady Angela, who had just descended the stairs, was standing there, pale and unsubstantial as a shadow, and it seemed to me that her eyes, as she looked across at me, were full of trouble. She came slowly towards us. Blenavon laid his hand upon ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... failed to anticipate, what has proved the power of God and the wisdom of God to the world's renovation. Such is the best preparation for still learning, how much that wears the appearance of wisdom and science unsubstantial. This best teaches so to reason soberly and conscientiously, as not to run into licentiousness the liberty of thinking. Religious zeal indeed has hitherto been little enough tempered with discretion; but no other zeal has glowed so intensely, without ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... a pity that dear Artie couldn't take a fancy to some nice, appreciative, kind-hearted, practical girl like that now, instead of wearing away all the best days of his life in useless regret for that poor slender, unsubstantial nonentity of a ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human sense,—an awful ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... whose ideas seem to be dug out of his mind, hard and substantial, as he digs his potatoes, carrots, beets, and turnips out of the earth. Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... look upon it as the art of dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and unsubstantial argumentation as the following:—"Let us suppose the state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... sole hope of indemnity lay in a possible intervention of the Catholic powers in his behalf—a hope which by Prussia's defeat of France and the downfall of the Emperor Napoleon III. was rendered extremely unsubstantial. The possibility of intervention was, however, sufficiently considerable to occasion real apprehension on the part of Victor Emmanuel and of those attached to the interests of the young nation. In part to avert complications abroad, as well as with an honest purpose to adjust a ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Emily's color rushed back. Satisfied, Bailey led the way to the tiers of seats, almost empty at this hour. Pearly, unsubstantial in the young light, lay the huge oval meadow and the track edging it. Of the fourteen cars starting, nine were still circling their course, one temporarily ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... light, shadowy form, hovering near the sylvan couch of Claud, like some unsubstantial being of the air; now advancing, now shrinking away, and now again flitting forward to the head of the youthful sleeper, and there pausing and preventing the light from longer revealing his features? Yes, what is it? would ask a doubting spectator of this singular ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... God, how the imperfections persisted! But, he told himself savagely, in the end the metal was steadfast. He would, certainly, overcome her natural revulsion from what she had just heard. The colour had left her cheeks, violet shadows gathered about her eyes; she seemed more unsubstantial than ever. He would repay again and again the suffering he had brought her. Having declared himself he was almost tranquil; there was a total absence of the impetuous emotionalism of youth, the blind tyranny of desire. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... brake of flowering furze (Above it shivering aspens play) He sees an unsubstantial creature, His very self in form and feature, Not four yards from ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... English Canadians are fighting side by side three thousand miles from their homes for the maintenance of the Empire is to envisage the most startling of historical paradoxes. That old, bad time seems as unsubstantial as a dream; this seems the only reality; and yet the two periods are separated only by the span of a not very long human life. {163} The truth is that in those days there were no Canadians. There were French on the banks of the St Lawrence, but ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rags, that the Arab is no more native to Algeria than the Esquimaux. I was much nearer home than the Arabs. That shining coast which occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat on the sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work of Iris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was the bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of granite under the wrack of the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... to an understanding. In the next summer Schumann made formal mention of his suit to her father. Wieck's refusal may have been due to his entertaining higher hopes for his now famous daughter, but at any rate the father found an adequate reason in the vague and unsubstantial prospects of the young composer. This was a sad blow, but Schumann tacitly acknowledged its justice, for he soon began making efforts to better his condition, instead of working only for the glory of art. Although he tried ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... refused to taste, notwithstanding all his importunities. He then fell on his knees before her, and the tears gushing from his eyes, swore that his passion was wound up to such a pitch of impatience, that he could no longer live upon the unsubstantial food of expectation; and that, if she would not vouchsafe to crown his happiness, he would forthwith sacrifice himself to her disdain. Such an abrupt address, accompanied with all the symptoms of frantic agitation, could not fail ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... real than reality, and being so, must be couched in different words from such as describe the things that one's bodily eyes behold of the grim reality of this world. Such things, being so told, may seem as strange and as unsubstantial as that which is unreal, instead of ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... hate thee," low he muttered, "It was by thee that I was always tricked, My unsubstantial bread I ate unbuttered In ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... awake and refusing to be drugged, had kept sounding its alarm to rise and seek Romley; and though at length she obeyed in a panic, she went as one walking in sleep. The front of the cathedral, as she came beneath its shadow, overhung her as a phantom drawn upon the morning sky, its tall towers unsubstantial, trembling against the light, but harmless even should they fall upon her. She entered as one might pass through ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... although he heard the tramp, yet he could for the moment see nothing in the shape of either figure or form, from which he could resolve what he had heard into a natural sound. At length, as he stood almost dissolved in terror, he thought that an indistinct, or rather an unsubstantial figure stood at the carriage-door, looked in for a moment, and then bent his glance at him, with a severe and stem expression; after which, it began to rub out or efface a certain portion of the armorial bearings, which he had added to his heraldic coat in right ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... trouble. That would be too much trouble to her; he dared not give it her. She could not cope with him. It made him ashamed. So, secretly ashamed because he was in such a mess, because his own hold on life was so unsure, because nobody held him, feeling unsubstantial, shadowy, as if he did not count for much in this concrete world, he drew himself together smaller and smaller. He did not want to die; he would not give in. But he was not afraid of death. If nobody would help, he would go ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the enclosed check of $50, as a slight token of regard from our absent trio. As I hardly need tell you, the lion's share of this birthday gift is sent by my father, but neither mother nor I will admit that in the unsubstantial, and yet I hope not valueless part of the offering, the personal regard and appreciation of your noble work for woman which accompany it, our contribution is any less than his. I ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of the nymph, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... character in supposing that she could be more firm than he. He was so strong that he treated her almost as a child;—and yet she loved him infinitely the better for so treating her. Of course, she knew now that her objection, whether true or unsubstantial, could not avail. As he stood with his arm round her, she was powerless to contradict him in anything. She had so far acknowledged this that she no longer struggled with him, but allowed her hand to remain quietly within his. If there was no going ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... reputation, like chastity and considerable possessions, is often valued as high as life itself, the same right exists to defend it even at the cost of another's life. But it must be remembered that the loss of character sustained in consequence of an insult of this kind is something very ephemeral and unsubstantial; and only to a mind abnormally sensitive can any proportion be perceived between the loss and the remedy. This is especially true when the attack is in words and goes no farther than words: for "sticks and stones ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... not to give. For, in all the ten days of our stay there, we could not buy ten fanegas of rice; and if they brought anything it was cocoanuts, bananas, tamalle, and other articles of the fruit kind, of very unsubstantial and ordinary quality. This will prove to be the truth, rather than what is said in opposition thereto. And when we arrived at these islands, we were in great need of food, as we had on board the fleet nothing but biscuit—and even that in small quantity, as it was carried ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... limitations. Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life, seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power'; Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of delightfulness, and, to those able to understand ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to inquire into the appearance of ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon, we find, as we should expect, that they are a vague, unsubstantial copy of their former selves on earth. In Homer[12] the shade of Patroclus, which visited Achilles in a vision as he slept by the sea-shore, looks exactly as Patroclus had looked on earth, even down to the clothes. Hadrian's famous "animula vagula blandula" gives the same ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... of the Earth, As from the cells of an awakened soul, Fling your hoarse murmurs and aspiring groans To the strong winged winds, that puff them on In sport and in derision; that art stirred To tumult and to madness by the breath Of unseen currents, unsubstantial air, That passes on, and leaves a foaming train To wonder at the thing that angered them. O wild, wild sea! soul of indifference! Lashing eternally the rifted sands And lonely shores about ye; swallowing The wreck of man's dependence, and the life ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... doubtful way clear before him. He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as he had counted on,—coldness, prejudice, disdain,—that all he had taken for these were but unsubstantial shadows. Still he showed no premature triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth, were depending upon it. And Zelma spoke at last,—briefly and coldly, but in a manner neither suspicious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Mrs. Manstey; and she was dying, as she had lived, lonely if not alone. The doctor had sent a trained nurse, and Mrs. Sampson, with muffled step, came in from time to time; but both, to Mrs. Manstey, seemed remote and unsubstantial as the figures in a dream. All day she said nothing; but when she was asked for her daughter's address she shook her head. At times the nurse noticed that she seemed to be listening attentively for some sound which did not come; then ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the whole scheme of Nature, the delicious discovery of the virtues of solitude, the loveliness of this most gay and youthful earth, and the tones of the pleasant-voiced and often surly sea fill me with joy and embellish hope—vague and unsubstantial—for is not this Isle the "place where one may have many thoughts and not ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... through the park gates; young ladies, bright in Bond Street toilets, flashed like deities upon the village street; my Lady Bountiful left a quarter of a pound of tea at half a dozen cottages; and then the whole vision faded like an unsubstantial pageant. The blinds were drawn down again, the lodge-keeper went to sleep, and the monotonies of life submerged everything like a wave. The clergyman alone remained as the symbol of a fuller life, sometimes ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it—the only sea- mark given—a certain ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Endymion, takes something of the youth and strength of Enidymion, and sees the dear white goddess shining at him from his Lady's eyes. The firm substantial daylight things become ghostly and elusive, the hills beyond are a sea of unsubstantial texture, the world a visible spirit, the spiritual within us rises out of its darkness, loses something of its weight and body, and swims up towards heaven. This road that was a mere rutted white dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft grey silence, with the ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... according to Socialists, an outworn creed. "As Marx says, 'The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. Christianity, like all religions, is but an expression of material conditions, a direct outcome of social relations, the unsubstantial image of a world reflected in the muddy pool of human intellect. Jesus varies with the ages. Redeemer of Roman slave; War-God of Crusader; General Overseer of Manufacturing Capitalist."[996] Besides, Socialists resent "the continual reference of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... imbecile and a blunderer, he blandly lights another cigar; if you praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the Presidency, it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises. While you are wondering what kind of man this creature without a tongue is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid victory, proving ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the one hand, and of the town and harbor on the other; no one ever climbed the hill from the city to gaze over into that hidden valley without feeling a pleasurable surprise at finding it still there. We are accustomed to think of perfect beauty as unsubstantial, evanescent; but the Yumuri never changed, and in that ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... alone in my chamber, but these themes have taken such hold of my imagination, that I cannot sleep. The room in which I sit is just fitted to foster such a state of mind. The walls are hung with tapestry, the figures of which are faded, and look like unsubstantial shapes melting away from sight. Over the fire-place is the portrait of a lady, who, according to the housekeeper's tradition, pined to death for the loss of her lover in the battle of Blenheim. She has a most pale and plaintive ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... direct his destiny or give warning of what was in store for him; and he watches the world of nature around him as the astrologer watches the stars. So closely is he linked with it that his guardian spirit, no unsubstantial creation of the fancy, is usually embodied in the form of some living thing—a bear, a wolf, an eagle, or a serpent; and Mene-Seela, as he gazed intently on the old pine tree, might believe it to inshrine the fancied guide and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... their being fitted each to its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. A person who does not deliberately ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... an instance of a common enough Hebrew idiom, and is equivalent to saying—he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is gone again ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... domed roofs, and they rise above the dead level of the delta like mounds. Many of these villages have probably occupied the same site since the days of the Pharaohs, the debris and rubbish of centuries have accumulated and been built upon again and again as the unsubstantial mud dwellings have crumbled away, until they have gradually developed into mounds that rise like huge mole-hills above the plain, and on which the present houses are built. Near each village is a graveyard, also forming a mound-like excrescence on the dead ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... power of planning a combination, and of that calm, broad, military intelligence which distinguished General Lee."* (* Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac page 289.) And this verdict, except in the South, has been generally accepted. Yet it rests on a most unsubstantial basis. Because Jackson knew so well how to obey it is asserted that he was not well fitted for independent command. Because he could carry out orders to the letter it is assumed that he was no master of strategy. Because his will was of iron, and his ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... hands in solemn union, making friends Our factions with the friendship of their chiefs. Let us in marriage, King and Queen, unite Claims ever hostile else, and set thy son— No more an exile fed on empty hopes, And to an unsubstantial title heir, But prince adopted by the will of power, And future king—before this people's eyes. Consider him! consider not old hates! Consider, too, this people, who were dear To their dead king, thy husband—yea, too dear, For that destroy'd him. Give them peace! thou can'st. O Merope, how many ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold |
